Leaf

A leaf is an organ of a vascular plant and is the principal lateral appendage of the stem. The leaves and stem together form the shoot.Foliage is a mass noun that refers to leaves collectively.

Typically a leaf is a thin, dorsiventrally flattened organ, borne above ground and specialized for photosynthesis. Most leaves have distinctive upper (adaxial) and lower (abaxial) surfaces that differ in colour, hairiness, the number of stomata (pores that intake and output gases) and other features. In most plant species, leaves are broad and flat. Such species are referred to as broad-leaved plants. Many gymnosperm species have thin needle-like leaves that can be advantageous in cold climates frequented by snow and frost. Leaves can also have other shapes and forms such as the scales in certain species of conifers. Some leaves are not above ground (such as bulb scales). Succulent plants often have thick juicy leaves, but some leaves are without major photosynthetic function and may be dead at maturity, as in some cataphylls, and spines). Furthermore, several kinds of leaf-like structures found in vascular plants are not totally homologous with them. Examples include flattened plant stems (called phylloclades and cladodes), and phyllodes (flattened leaf stems), both of which differ from leaves in their structure and origin. Many structures of non-vascular plants, and even of some lichens, which are not plants at all (in the sense of being members of the kingdom Plantae), look and function much like leaves. The primary site of photosynthesis in most leaves (palisade mesophyll) almost always occurs on the upper side of the blade or lamina of the leaf but in some species, including the mature foliage of Eucalyptus palisade occurs on both sides and the leaves are said to be isobilateral.

Leaf (disambiguation)

A leaf is an organ of a vascular plant.

Leaf or Leaves may also refer to:

Material

People

Music

Organisations

Leaf (Japanese company)

Leaf is a Japanese visual novel studio under the publisher Aquaplus, and has offices in Yodogawa-ku, Osaka, and Tokyo. It and its competitor Key (to which it is often compared) are two of the most popular and successful dedicated visual novel studios operating today. It was launched out of obscurity by its early release To Heart. Leaf used the XviD video codec in several games: Aruru to Asobo!!, Tears to Tiara, Kusari, and ToHeart2 X Rated. Since XviD is free software, released under the GPL, Leaf was forced to release the source code to those games under the same license. One still required the game data to actually play the games with the source code. In addition, a free software engine called xlvns was developed soon after Leaf released its first three visual novels. Characters from Utawarerumono, Tears to Tiara, To Heart, and Kizuato are playable in Aquapazza: Aquaplus Dream Match, a fighting game developed by Aquaplus featuring characters from various Leaf games.